


stardust's darling

by ebenroot



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Royalty, Alternate Universe - Space, Arranged Marriage, Bodyguard Romance, Knight Seung Gil, M/M, Mutual Pining, Prince Phichit Chulanont
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:48:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25296436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ebenroot/pseuds/ebenroot
Summary: three times seung-gil entertained the thought of being his prince’s love and the one time he finds out he was his prince’s love the entire time--written for Majesties: The Yuri!!! on Ice Royalty Zine
Relationships: Jean-Jacques Leroy/Isabella Yang, Katsuki Yuuri/Victor Nikiforov, Minor or Background Relationship(s), Phichit Chulanont/Lee Seung Gil
Comments: 8
Kudos: 130
Collections: Majesties: The Yuri!!! on Ice Royalty Zine





	stardust's darling

The first time, it’s just to scare the Duke of Saris. It didn’t mean anything. Nothing at all. 

Seung-Gil knows that it is His Prince’s duty to be cordial to the celestial representatives at the Gala. After all, it is the first time Dalinthia has hosted such a prestigious event to celebrate the arts of the host planet’s finest. He knows His Prince wants nothing more than to be a fine host and share to the galaxy how wonderful his planet is. His Prince is a talker. He’s a smiler. He’s a hugger and an ‘oh won’t you try this and drink that and listen to this, I’m sure you’ll love it’ kind of person, which is completely fine. 

Just, sometimes, it works too well for His Prince’s own damn good.

It’s the third night of festivities when the Duke sidles up beside His Highness, Prince Chulanont of Dalinthia. However, Seung-Gil knows the man has been eyeing Prince Chulanont since the opening ceremony. Not that Seung-Gil has been paying closer attention to the Duke or anything. He’s the First Officer of the Dalinthian Corps; he scrutinizes and judges everyone equally, and he would have visibly bristled with disgust at anyone that swaggered over to Prince Chulanont in the same manner the Duke did. Honest.

“You were talking about this delicacy before, weren’t you, Your Highness?” the Duke asks. He’s holding in one of his hands a Dalinthian Peach Tart, the fruit cut and shaped into a flower sitting atop a bed of marshmallow creme while the orange and pink skin is used as a garnish and decoration on the primrose plate it sits upon. 

Prince Chulanont nods his head, eyes eager. “Yes! It’s my favorite dessert by far! You know, there’s a saying that if you split open a peach on the first day of Tanaburn and it’s still pink inside, you will have good luck for the rest of the year,” he gushes. The Duke nods his head and steps in closer, poking at the tart with the edge of his fork.

“Really? How do you tell if this one is a ‘lucky’ one?” the Duke asks in a stupid tone, stupidly blinking his three eyes in a stupidly bashful way that has Seung-Gil literally grinding his teeth (which is a normal reaction in this circumstance that can happen to anyone). But, Prince Chulanont doesn’t mind or notices. Of course, he doesn’t. In fact, Seung-Gil’s Prince moves in closer so he can pluck the fork from the Duke’s hands and lightly cut through the flower peach himself. 

“See?” Prince Chulanont says, showing where the four prongs are stuck into a pink juicy slice. “Pink right there. Looks like you’re going to have good luck!”

The Duke smiles, and his hand casually slips onto Prince Chulanont’s waist. There’s a second where Prince Chulanont gives a twitch, where the corner of his mouth falters and ‘oh no’ paints his face before it replaces itself with a smile. “Uh,” he starts, trying to still be nice as he hands the Duke back his fork, “but yeah, it’s a really delicious fruit. One of the best our planet has to offer, right, Seung-Gil?”

Seung-Gil stoically nods his head, eyebrows setting into a hard line to wordlessly say one phrase: ‘GO AWAY’.

The Duke does not. Instead, he takes the fork to his mouth and licks the marshmallow creme off of the slice with his long green tongue, before he sucks the fruit into his mouth with a wet slurp.

“Delicious,” he says in between chews. “I’m sure you have other fine… ’delicacies’ that will satiate my palate, yes?”

Here’s the thing: Seung-Gil is the rational one in the Dalinthian Corps. You don’t become the First Officer by being the ‘shoot first, make shit up the rest of the way’ kind of guy, which is exactly why Seung-Gil pulls His Prince to his hip and delivers in a dry tone, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t flirt with my boyfriend.” Because it’s the rational thing to do.

The Duke looks between the two of them, quickly sputtering out his apologies and ‘I didn’t know’s and ‘how embarrassing’s, before he excuses himself and fast walks into a crowd to disappear out of Seung-Gil’s line of sight. Seung-Gil’s hold on Prince Chulanont doesn’t lessen until he hears the other murmur, “Boyfriend?”

He turns his head and Prince Chulanont’s eyes are doing that Thing. That Thing where their faces are suddenly veryveryclose and Seung-Gil can see his face in His Prince’s eyes. His reflection looks like he’s drowning in a sea of grey that threatens to swallow him, but at the same time invites Seung-Gil to just move a little bit closer, come on, just come in closer-

“Champagne I’m getting,” Seung-Gil blurts, retracting his hand from His Prince’s waist like the fire he feels beneath his cheeks managed to burst it into flames. He then turns on his heel, fast walks in the opposite direction that doesn’t really lead to the champagne fountain, but sure as hell runs quickly away from whatever that was.

* * *

The second time isn’t really the second time in Seung-Gil’s opinion, because Seung-Gil doesn’t say anything and it’s 99.9 percent wholly because Leroy is an absolute idiot.

It happens after their sparring practice but before Seung-Gil needs to escort his Prince to a charity event. Seung-Gil has his towel around his neck, dabbing away at his sweat-drenched skin. Out of nowhere from behind, Leroy makes this sound like an airhorn just barely running out of compressed air to blow. 

“My Honey left me a gift!” Leroy fawns and he’s shoving a small silver tin of cookies right in Seung-Gil’s face before he can put away his towel. The smell is sweet, the sentiment of ‘I love you’ drowning the treats along with the chocolate syrup and sugar dust. He grunts, pushing the tin away with the back of his hand. 

“Get that out of my face. We still have three more practice rounds to go through before we take a break.”

“But my Honey made this!” Leroy shouts, like Seung-Gil didn’t hear him the first time. “I can’t just put my Honey’s love on hold!”

“I’m not asking you to put your ‘Honey’s’ love on hold, I’m telling you to—“ Leroy’s already biting into a cookie, moseying over to one of the benches. Seung-Gil exhales sharply through his nose, clenching and unclenching his fist. Someday, when they’re sparring, he’ll punch Leroy so hard in the head that common sense will finally get knocked into him. That day isn’t today, but someday, it’s going to happen.

“You’ll understand when you have a Honey of your own making you things, Cap,” Leroy says with a grin that has chocolate smudges at the corners of his mouth. 

“Even if I were to get a ‘Honey’, I wouldn’t need them to be making me frivolous crap that reduces all levels of higher thinking,” Seung-Gil chides. Leroy offers Seung-Gil a cookie again. Adamantly, he takes one and bites into it. They are delicious, so Seung-Gil just gets more annoyed.

“It’s more to it, though!” Leroy reassures. “Like, think about if you gave His Highness something that you knitted.”

Seung-Gil doesn’t know how his secret hobby of knitting or His Prince managed to be brought up in the same sentence. Leroy takes advantage of his captain’s stunned silence to continue. “Can you picture him at some gala or something with it on and then some dignitary comes up to him like—“ Leroy puffs his chest out, turns his nose up towards the ceiling lamps—“I say, Your Highness, that is such a fetching scarf you’re wearing. Where may I purchase it?’ And then, His Highness goes, ‘Oh, you can’t buy it actually. Cause my Honey made it!’. Like, dude. Are you seriously telling me you would not get chills from hearing that?”

Seung-Gil is getting chills just from imagining it. 

He coughs. “Well that’s…I’m supposed to serve His Highness. Not be his…”

Leroy’s chocolate-covered grin goes sly. “Go on. His ’Honey’.”

“Right. That word.”

“Why not be both? You can serve him and be his Honey…his ‘Royal Honey’.”

Suddenly, Seung-Gil loses all his understanding of language. That is the only probable explanation for why the words — if they even are words — that come out of Leroy’s mouth afterward sound like a long string of unintelligible gibberish. Swiftly, he turns on his heel, shielding his face from showing Leroy where he feels his cheeks stinging, where he feels the tips of his ears positively burning.

“Finish your cookies so we can get back to sparring. I don’t have all day to check your competency in fighting,” he grumbles, stomping off to get something to drink or to splash on his face to make this burning stop.

And if he goes a little bit too harshly on Leroy when they continue, if maybe his body got a little bit too zealous to the point that his muscles ached and he quietly suffered in silence while escorting His Prince to his meeting, well, that has nothing to do with what Leroy said. Not at all.

* * *

The third time it occurs (and is it really the third time? Is Seung-Gil really keeping count of these occurrences? Why are they happening so frequently now????), it only exists in the deep corners of his mind.

“Ahh, they’re so cute,” Prince Chulanont fawns. He’s got his chin propped up by his hands, ignoring the plate of food Seung-Gil brought for him to instead watch as His Highness, Prince Yuuri of Val-Mehr glides across the dance floor in a visage of white, his newly made husband Nikiforov leading the movement. “When will that be me, Seung-Gil?” he asks rhetorically. “When will I find a prince instead of the creeps that keep throwing themselves at me?”

Nikiforov technically isn’t a prince. He’s a cadet from a space colony, practically nomads to their solar system. But still, after hearing the admission of His Prince wanting one of his own, there’s suddenly a weird taste in Seung-Gil’s mouth. 

He doesn’t know why there’s a weird taste in his mouth. Maybe it’s from the cake. 

“I am sure you’ll find someone, Your Highness,” he mumbles after smacking his lips to rid his tongue of the taste, chasing the movement with a swig of champagne for good measure. Prince Chulanont hums, eyes still trained on Prince Yuuri and Nikiforov, watching the way the sheer long sleeves of Prince Yuuri’s robes flutter as he twirls. 

“Father suggested that I choose my suitor if I do not like the ones he has suggested for me to entertain,” he tells Seung-Gil. “Which, if that is the case, then I already know exactly the person I wish to ask to court me.”

Seung-Gil chokes a little on his champagne.

“Wha—“ he awkwardly takes the napkin His Prince offers him, tries to ignore the worry mixed with slight bemusement twinkling in His Prince’s eyes. “Who is it?”

“Hmm, it’s a secret.”

“As First Officer of the Dalinthian Corps and your personal bodyguard, I feel that I should approve of any and all personnel that come in contact with you.” He’s talking fast for some reason, talking loud even though the string quartet playing and the chatter from the reception isn’t even that noisy. 

“Are you trying to say that I’m incompetent in my selection of character?”

“No. I just — people just might not be all that they seem and…stuff.”

“And stuff,” Prince Chulanont repeats. Seung-Gil nods. And stuff indeed. 

His Prince gives a quiet hum, scooting a bit closer to Seung-Gil’s side, maybe so Seung-Gil doesn’t have the need to be talking so damn loud. “Well, that should mean I should pick someone I know fairly well, right? Someone I’ve known for a long time?”

Seung-Gil takes another drink of his champagne, a bit slower. “Hypothetically speaking, yes.”

“So, hypothetically, I should suggest someone that I’m fairly close with. And, hypothetically speaking, this person should be someone that you would approve of.” Prince Chulanont taps his finger against his bottom lip in concentration. “Is there anything else this hypothetical person should be?”

With all hypotheticals aside, Seung-Gil knows he can’t dictate who His Prince falls in love with. He can’t really have a say in who gets the honor of spending each moment at His Prince’s side, who gets to mean something more to His Prince than Seung-Gil himself ever would. The bitterness floods his tongue again. He begins to sip on water to get rid of it for good.

“In the end, it is you that has to be with them, so—“ he shrugs, but the motion is a bit stiff, a bit challenged in feigning nonchalance. 

Prince Chulanont clicks his tongue. “Well, I would like for them to go on walks with me, for starters.”

Seung-Gil nods. Indeed, His Prince does enjoy his private strolls around the garden or through the palace, the love of wandering and exploring in general and finding something new on every walk he takes. Granted, Seung-Gil isn’t going to like giving up his position at His Prince’s side to whoever His Prince takes as his spouse, but if it is what His Prince wants, then Seung-Gil will comply.

“I’d like for them to be kind as well. Make me smile in their own special little way.”

Another nod. Seung-Gil wouldn’t tolerate anything less.

“Good at fighting so I know they can protect me, good-looking in almost a painful way, but not narcissistic about it, and they have a soft side that only I get to see.”

Seung-Gil wrinkles his nose. “Rather specific criteria.”

“I told you. I already know the person I want to ask.”

“Hm.”

“I’m sure you’d like them. I’d be surprised if you didn’t.”

Seung-Gil only has a vague imagining of the person, but he’s pretty sure he kinda hates them. 

“We’ll see what happens,” he mutters, getting to his feet. “Should I fetch you dessert?”

Prince Chulanont smiles at him with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, some kind of knowing glow to his cheeks. 

“Cake would be lovely.”

* * *

It is only until a few days have passed after Seung-Gil had his discussion with His Prince that Leroy sidles up to him and asks, “Dude, did you and Phichit break up? Why’re you looking so mad?”

They’re standing at the back of the dining hall, waiting diligently for the Prince to arrive with his father for a small lunch in which His Highness, the Prince Chulanont will announce his selection for a spouse to begin courting. 

And, well, Seung-Gil didn’t really want to hear what name comes sighing from His Prince’s lips as his intended. He was hiding in the rec room, furiously beating up a boxing bag before Leroy had to drag him out. 

“There’s so much in that statement alone that agitates me that I don’t even know where to focus,” Seung-Gil says through clenched teeth. Leroy blinks, not getting it. To Seung-Gil’s small chagrin, he is deprived of the pleasure of chewing Leroy out, but blessed with the sudden announcement that His Prince and His Majesty have arrived, Prince Chulanont glides into the dining hall with the train of his robes bellowing with his movement.

“Seung-Gil!” he calls and Seung-Gil is quick to excuse himself. Prince Chulanont wraps an arm around Seung-Gil’s bicep, smiling kindly. “You’re here early.”

“Of course. Shouldn’t I be?” Seung-Gil realizes His Prince is leading him to sit down at his side at the dining table, which is odd. There are only three chairs that are set, and His Majesty takes the only available seat opposite of them. Shouldn’t…shouldn’t Seung-Gil be somewhere else?

His Prince hums, brushing a lock of hair tenderly out of Seung-Gil’s confused face. “Well, I already told my father on the way, so it’s not like we’ll spend long discussing—“ Seung-Gil blinks. He’s…he’s already made his decision? Without even having the presence of the intended for Seung-Gil to scrutinize and not-hate with all his heart?

His Majesty scratches at his chin. “Well, I do have a few questions I’d like to ask—“

“But you already gave your permission—“

“But it’s the principle of the thing, Phichit!” His Majesty sternly protests, turning now to look at Seung-Gil. Why is he looking at him? Should he leave? Seung-Gil starts to get up, but His Prince holds him back down.

“Do you promise to love and cherish my son? Protect him with your very last breath? Care for him when he needs you the most?” His Majesty asks in his warm timbre.

“…Is this a trick question?” Seung-Gil asks.

“…Well, if you’re going to marry my son, I would presume it not to be a joke.”

Seung-Gil blinks. He looks to His Prince, then to the Majesty. Back at His Prince, back at His Majesty, then a quick glance at Leroy who is giving him the thumbs up oh my god. “I - I’m the intended???”

“You didn’t know?” His Prince asks, eyes widening. “I thought it was pretty obvious that I was talking about you at Yuuri’s wedding…did you really think I could have fallen in love with someone without you knowing?? You literally pounce on anyone that comes within breathing distance of me to know their purpose and vocation.”

“Cause that’s my job.” Seung-Gil is getting really hot right now, and it’s not fair that His Prince’s smile is doing that to his heart right now. He takes a few seconds to try and collect his thoughts, which mainly consists of him repeating ‘oh my god’ into his palms while His Prince lovingly strokes his hair, Leroy providing a background vocal of hooting and hollering. 

“So,” His Majesty begins again when Seung-Gil finally drops his hands to his lap and finds His Prince tangling their fingers together in that familiar way, that loving way. “What is your answer?”

Seung-Gil looks to His Prince, and he sees himself reflected in those shiny grey eyes. He sees what he’s always wanted to covet for so so long.

“…Yes. Always.”


End file.
